For the last few
years I have had an interest in configuration management of
IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a
considerable amount of experience with the problems associated
with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also
one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management.

In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily
Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I
worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for
configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP
and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of …

How do you build one of the busiest websites
on the Internet? You wouldn’t guess the right answer to be, “You
download some free software and hack it”…Actually the
question is how do you build one of the world’s busiest websites
that will scale affordably? You use open source
software.

Twitter showed everyone their cards recently by publishing all
the open source projects that they are contributing
to. This is the picture of how open source software should work.

Organization has a a big, hard problem to solve. They write
some software or update existing software and …

I have been a little bit stubborn on my
concession that cloud computing is really going to be the wave of
the future. Though lately I have been playing with a lot of cloud
related technologies and am hooked. Spin up 10 (or 100) Linux
servers in a minute from a web page with no real systems
management skills and then you start seeing the power of cloud
computing. As I try to get smarter on cloud computing I compiled
the following list of resources that I have found helpful.
If you have a great cloud resource please feel free to let me
know what I am missing on.

Last month cloud computing and systems
management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls
the Cloudies. I am not an expert on the latest
developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of
the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was
especially interested in the latest open source software and I
did a little research on each of these projects to see if they
had active development mailing lists, regular releases and
a real community behind …

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing
some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo!
This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source
ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware …

Removing Barriers to the Community - MySQL Moves to Bazaar - Jay
Pipes It is the role of a community manager to remove the
barriers — both technical and ideological — between the
user/developer community and the company or group of individuals
which produces the open source software

Over the last few years there has been a lot
of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation
events. Most of the news has been around Sun’s billion dollar
acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of
Xen and even Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was
little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most
open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer
“SourceWho?” If you ask open source users if they have heard of
ClamAV or
Snort they
probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open
source software for virus protection and intrusion detection
respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a …

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay along with well-known
Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that
Microsoft doesn’t need open source. Asay contends that
Microsoft’s open source activity has more to do with regulators
than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft’s open-source charade is not about customers. It’s about regulators. Until Microsoft can
convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is
not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind
expressions of openness.

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